Via the user ShamelessMendacity on Reddit in response to the question "Ad people, what do you say to people who say they are not influenced by advertising or branding?"

Great advertising changes your behaviour. It doesn't change what you want - doesn't even attempt to. It changeshow you want.

An example: If you ask people what they want to have five years from now, most of them will give you a list that's essentially an upgrade of things they currently own, or that their friends and colleagues have. A better car. A bigger house. A nice kitchen. Better furniture.

That's all fine - but then you should ask them what they're picturing when they say "a better car."

Chances are they're not thinking of a slight upgrade on their Ford Mondeo - they're thinking of an Audi. Or a Lexus. And when they say "a nice kitchen" it'll have a specific set of features that approximate to something made by Viking.

It's legitimate to want "better" things, but one of the most powerful effects of branding is that people have learned to benchmark quality based on brands with which they're already somewhat familiar. And even if the choice is negative, buying an Acura specifically because it isn't a Lexus is still a choice made with Lexus in mind.

By advertising themselves and branding themselves in a certain way, brands can completely change your relationship with their entire category.

Oh, and if someone says they're not influenced by advertising, they're actually admitting that advertising has the power to influence. Just that it doesn't influence them. And people don't make their choices in a vacuum. Even if you never watched TV or listened to the radio, never read a magazine, or surfed the internet, and only read books written before 1914, and were completely immune from the influence of advertising, you're still going to be influenced by what everyone around you is doing. You may not care about pop culture, but it cares about you.

Is it too soon to talk about Christmas?

Year after year, the whisper of Christmas arrives on the autumn wind. With a little help, the whisper builds quickly to a song and then a shout. Frenzy grows. Shoppers are trampled.

How does it happen? I have some ideas that may account for the popularity and success of consumer Christmas.

Consumer Christmas is based on an existing broadly recognized cultural-religious holiday, which gives it legitimacy, but it has been effectively expurgated of all spiritual meaning, which means you don’t have to be Christian—or even religious—to celebrate it.

It has persistent and wholesome themes (charity, selflessness, giving, family, light in the darkness). In our fast-paced convenience culture, with little time to make gifts or really even think about them, the theme of giving means buying.

It has simple symbols (trees, stars, snow, wrapped gifts, red, green), which allow it to easily spread and adapt to different places and cultures.

And it has honourable mascots (Santa, Jesus). Who doesn’t root for poor babies born in barns and jolly eccentric old white men who bring gifts to the good children and coal to the bad ones?

Followers defend it vehemently, whether or not they have a faith connection to it.

You never need to tell people it's coming. Everyone already expects it.

Its power of truncated tradition and manipulated myth combine to create a gravitational pull that sometimes traps other events, like Boxing Day, in its orbit. Other pure marketing schemes, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, try to ride the gravitational wave to prominence.

A brief digression

No other holiday is more associated with a child’s smiling face as she unwraps a gift. Today, however, these anticipation and joy have moved from the holiday to the everyday. We have elevated unwrapping to an art, a spectacle to share with the world, and called it unboxing. This is the power of consumer Christmas.

A questionable conclusion

I haven't got a clue what you can do with this information. Okay, maybe I have one clue.

I guess don’t mess with success is the best I can assess. It’s a fair bet that until Jesus returns, Santa will be his lieutenant and consumer Christmas will march around every year, everywhere. It's hard to out-promote a man who selflessly travels the globe bearing gifts for all. (You don’t hear too much about the kids who get coal these days.) It's also hard to be heard above the noise.

I've got a few questions, too.

What if marketers always acted like they were selling to one person? That seems to be the goal of much marketing today, but does it succeed? What would that mean for Christmas: compassion, authenticity, humanity? Does this work? Without a sincere connection to the traditions of Christmas, how can a consumer respond to these themes in Christmas marketing?

I don't know! So please let me know what you think in the comments or on twitter.

"Surprise & Delight" videos are everywhere these days, but often the surprise isn't very interesting, isn't connected to the product or is so connected it feels forced.
That's why this spot from Land Rover New Zealand is so perfect. It's a truly spontaneous act of love from the brand that isn't just rewarding vocal influencers or creating a predictable vending machine stunt.

It's a beautiful little piece of film, and almost makes me want to buy an old Land Rover of my own to restore. Or at least a new one for new adventures.

I’m a big fan of Instagram these days (I post there more often than Facebook, and even used it to find a photographer for some family portraits) but haven’t been impressed with with way brands are using it (Nike and a few other sports brands aside).

However, Smirnoff New Zealand made excellent use of the photo-sharing service throughout December with their #PurePotential campaign.

The gist of the idea was that Smirnoff NZ asked users to take a picture of the ingredients in their fridge, tagging the photo @SmirnoffNZ and #PurePotential and that the brand would give them a recipe for a vodka-based drink they could make with the ingredients. These recipes came in the form of high-quality videos, perfectly sized and paced for Instagram.

It worked well by taking advantage of that fact that user’s are used to giving their followers an intimate look at their lives using photos on Instagram.

It wasn’t just a social campaign, either. They had out of home ads (billboards, bus shelters, wild postings) throughout Auckland (and, I presume, New Zealand) related to the campaign, driving to Instagram and pushing the "Pure Potential" message.

PS: I’ve been impressed with a lot of the advertising work I’ve seen from New Zealand since I moved to Auckland a few months ago, and I’ll try and share more of it when I can.

Last week, I had to good fortune to attend the Communications Agencies Association of New Zealand's Effectiveness awards. The "Effies," as their called, are Kiwi equivalent of the Canadian Cassie awards. It was a great way to be exposed to some of the awesome advertising happening here, and I've included some of my highlights below.
SKY TV/ Game of Thrones: Bring Down The King

I might be a bit biased because it was my DDB New Zealand colleagues* who came up with this idea, and because I love Game of Thrones, but it was great to see this spot that lets Kiwis bring down a statue of Joffrey by tweeting about him win a gold at the Effies.

I heard somewhere that there is no where in New Zealand that is farther than 150km from the coast, and Auckland also apparently has the highest number of yachts per capita in the world so it makes sense that water safety is a big deal. The video below from Maritime New Zealand is a playful look at why you need to be wearing a life jacket for it to be effective.

Tui Beer: Catch a Million

I have no idea what cricket is about (and pretty much think of it as this) but I think everyone can still appreciate some of the great catches, even when they come from the crowd. Tui Beer capitalized on this by holding a promotion that promised a share of $1,000,000 to anyone in the crowd who caught a ball from the game with one hand. Check out the video below to see how this took off.

Bonus fact that I learned about cricket: They only change balls every 50 overs (which takes about 3 hours or so), so that the way the ball spins and bounces changes quite a bit throughout a game. Compare this to American Baseball, where I think they change up the ball almost every pitch to keep it consistent.

There were a lot of other great pieces of work at the awards, but those were my favourite. The full Effies results are here.

Even after all these years I've been in advertising, it's still exciting to see an idea go from research, through to strategy and a finished execution. That's why it's great to see the creative that my colleagues at DDB developed to promote SONY's line of High-Resolution audio products:

What do Punk Rock and Bird Watching have in common? Paul Riss. That's because he has just finished a "big year" (birdwatching lingo for seeing as many bird species as you can in one year) and is making a documentary about it. He's also getting a tattoo of every bird species he spotted, and there's punk rock involved.
Paul is a creative and talented individual at DDB Canada (my employer), so I'm really interested in seeing how this will turn out. Here's what he says about the project:

"I'm most excited about the fact that younger people might take a second look at birding because they always thought it was just for retired people. If they get interested, it generally leads to a love of the environment on a grander scale. "

I've been a a huge fan of Instagram for the past couple of months now. I know it's all about the people you follow, but Facebook is too full of brand posts for me, Twitter is just news and often I'm not interested in clicking through. Instagram is a quick-hit of beautiful images.
Anyways, here's a great shot of a Vancouver sunset on Instragram from my friend Natalie that she uploaded to Instagram:

The following post appeared originally on the the DDB Canada blog as part of the Radar DDB 10am series of blog posts and emails I contribute to at work.

A few months ago, Pepsi launched a global campaign, “Live For Now,” by redoing Pepsi.com to feature a waterfall of branded content and fan comments about the beverage. It was a unique way to embrace social media while not relying too heavily on third-party networks. More recently, Pepsi also partnered with Twitter.

On Tuesday night, we started to see what that partnership was capable of as Pepsi delivered on that “Live For Now” promise by streaming a Nicki Minaj concert on any Tweet with #NickiMinajNow hashtag. As the go-to site for what’s happening now, we think Twitter was a perfect channel for Pepsi and this campaign. It’s also a great reminder that the world still loves a super-star endorsement deal.

If you're a regular reader of BlogCampaigning, you might have noticed that we often slow down our posts during the summer months. Normally it's because I'm outside enjoying the great weather, but this year it was because I was working on an amazing project for McDonald's Canada called "Our Food. Your Questions."
You might have seen this video that was part of the campaign:

Or you might have just seen some of the great answers that my team of writers wrote in response to the thousands and thousands of questions that Canadians asked about food at McDonald's Canada:

No matter how you saw it, I hope it gave you new appreciation for the food that McDonald's Canada serves. I also hope that all of the hard work by an incredibly talented Tribal DDB team was able to shine through.

Have you ever wondered what kind of car you should by? Check out the autoLyzer, a Facebook App developed by DDB for autoTRADER.ca.
It works by analyzing your Facebook profile (including Likes, Friends, City, Age and a number of other factors) to determine the perfect car available on the autoTRADER.ca website for you.

I've never been a huge fan of email marketing and the fancy, HTML newsletters that are such a big part of it.

These are the emails you get that start off by saying "Having trouble viewing this email? View it on our website."

How many other advertising (or communications) formats start off this way?

Somehow, I don't think companies would be willing to invest in TV commercials if we said "This TV commercial is going to be great, but most people won't be able to view it right away - they'll have to push another button, or watch it on our website."

Yet these fancy HTML emails persist. They persist at the expense of wasted hours from talented designers and coders whose time could probably be spent creating something way more beautiful and useful.

For a time, my hosting provider (DreamHost) used to send out plain-text emails. They were very simply formatted. They could be read easily and quickly digested. One of these was even sent from an Apple store on one of the demo versions of the first iPhone.

And yes, I'm sure I could set up my email so that that it always displays images and I always see how great these emails are. But I don't. And I bet a lot of other people don't either.

What do you think about fancy, well-designed HTML emails? Worth it or not? Do you read them? Does your email tool display the images for you, or block them?

When I first grasped the concept of what a "weblog" was back in 2005 and the types of amazing stories, opinions and information in these things, I loved BoingBoing. To me, it was everything a website should be.
Overtime, I've grown sick of it. At one point, I stopped even reading BoingBoing. Now I mostly just check in a few times a week, using it as a thermometer with which to take temperature of a particular inward-looking sector of the internet.

Look, I'm sure Chevy and their agency are probably overjoyed that BoingBoing embedded it, even without naming the brand. But seriously, BoingBoing: Get off your high horse. Chevy created something you thought was cool. Deal with it.

A few weeks ago I was listening to a RadioLab podcast about Games. In this episode, hosts Robert Krulwich and Jad Abamrod spoke to Brian Christian, an author who recounted the story of the checkers craze of the 60s that culminated in the World Checkers Championship in 1963. Apparently. this championship was a series of 40 games between the world's two top players.
All 40 games ended in a draw. 21 of those 40 games were the exact same.

"Checkers had gotten to the point where there was a perfect game of checkers," Brian said as he discussed how the top players memorized previous games and knew the ideal countermove for the other player's moves. "This was rock bottom for the checkers community."

The name for this knowing of all the games, all the moves, is The Book.

Brian continues on the podcast to say that the same thing happens in chess, and that there is an equivalent book (actually a computer program called "Fritz" these ays) of every chess game played by grandmasters for the past few hundred years. Although there are way, way more variations, there are occasions where two grandmasters will play the exact same game that has been played years before. Nowadays, the first 20 moves or so in major chess games are totally by The Book: the two players playing moves that they've memorized, just like their checkers predecessors.

To chess enthusiasts, the most exciting part (and true brilliance) is when players go off The Book: that moment when they make a move that hasn't been done before in the history of recorded chess.

When I first started my career 5 years ago, there were no best practices for social media. There were no case studies. Everything was new. Everything we did was off the book.

Now it seems that everyone is staying on the book. Facebook brand pages are almost cookie-cutter copies of each other. Pitch emails to bloggers feel about as personal and special as a Hallmark card.

I still think there is a ton of opportunity to go off the book. I just worry that we're too concerned with playing that perfect game.